WHEN FACED WITH THE FREAKIEST THING YOU’VE ever seen, the best strategy is to divide and conquer. Andrea decided to m-scan the scene, while I took the enviable task of interviewing Henderson.
He didn’t look pleased.
I maneuvered him to a steel patio table sitting between the house and the workshop. We sat in the hard metal chairs. From here both of us could watch the workshop and the driveway, where Andrea prepared to swipe the m-scanner out of the Jeep and Grendel prepared to escape the moment she swung open the door.
The portable m-scanner resembled a sewing machine covered in clockwork vomit. It detected residual magic and spat the result out as a graph of colors: green for shapeshifter, purple for undead, blue for human. It was neither precise nor infallible, and reading an m-scan was more art than science, but it was still the best diagnostic tool we had. It also weighed close to eighty pounds.
Andrea opened the Jeep door and thrust her hand in. Grendel lunged and collided with her palm. The impact knocked him back. Andrea grabbed the m-scanner, yanked it out of the Jeep, and shut the door in Grendel’s furry face. The attack poodle lunged at the window and let out a long despondent howl.
Andrea turned and headed to the workshop, carrying the eightypound scanner with a light spring in her step, as if it were a picnic basket. Shapeshifter strength came in handy. Too bad the cost of Lyc-V
infection was so high.
Henderson watched Andrea walk across the yard. “A shapeshifter?”
“Yes.” You got a problem with that?
“Good.” Henderson nodded. “We could use her nose.”
I took out my notepad and my pen. “How many people are assigned to this detail?” Rene had said twelve, but it never hurt to check.
“Twelve, including me.”
“Three shifts of four guards, eight hours each?”
“Yes. Day, night, and graveyard.”
I wrote it down. “Which shift do you work?”
“I alternate between evening and graveyard. I worked the evening shift yesterday, fourteen hundred to twenty-two hundred.”
Figured. Most trouble happened after dark, and Henderson struck me as the type of man who wanted to meet trouble head on and punch it in the teeth. And the one time it did show up, he’d guessed wrong and missed it.
“When was the body discovered?”
“Oh six hundred at shift change.” Henderson crossed his arms. The good master sergeant plainly didn’t like the way my questions were going. Strange. Rene had already given me most of this information, so why did talking about it twist his panties in a bunch?
“Could you walk me through how the body was found?”
“Each shift has a shift sergeant. At five fifty-five a.m., day shift sergeant Julio Rivera and graveyard shift sergeant Debra Abrams made a routine check on the subject in the workshop.”
“Why the workshop? Why not the house?”
If Henderson’s face could harden any more, it would crack. “Because the man was last seen entering the workshop.”
If I still had my Order ID, this entire conversation would’ve gone a lot smoother. The ID commanded instant respect, especially from a former soldier like Henderson. His world broke into two camps, pro and amateur, and right now he pegged me for a hired gun of the second category. Rene had ordered him to cooperate and he was a company man, so he answered my questions, but he didn’t exactly recognize my right to ask them.
“Did Adam often work through the night?” I asked.